Groups
The Groups feature allows you to assign visitors to specific agent groups, so their chats go to the correct group of agents on your website. All Olark plans support Groups.
This guide has three parts:
Creating a group
First, navigate to your Groups page. On this page, you can create and manage your groups.
Click + New group to create your first custom group.
Now click on the group name to name your group. The group name is for your team's internal use, so is not public-facing.
Naming a group
Use the dropdown menu to add agents to your group. If you need to create a new agent, you can add them on the Team page, and then add them to the group.
Adding agents to a group
Once you have the Agents selected that you’d like to add to this group, click the Add button, and you’ll see your Agents appear in the Group agent list.
If you need the embed code, click the blue Show embed code link underneath the group name. You’ll find more about how to use that in Option 2 below.
From there, click on Save and close. Now, you’re ready to start chatting with Groups!
Removing Agents from a group
Agents can be in multiple groups. To stop assigning chats to an agent from any group, remove the agent from those groups.
From the Groups page, click 'Remove' to remove an agent from the group.
From the Team page, click Edit next to the agent username and uncheck the group(s) you do not want them to belong to.
Routing visitors to an agent group
We offer two options for automatically routing your visitors to Agent Groups. You can use either the Automation option or the JavaScript API option using the embed code. Both options are explained below. You only need to use one option per page, though. Using both could result in some conflicting Groups behavior.
Option 1: Using Automation
Create an Automation rule to assign a visitor to the agent group based on certain conditions.
You can also lock a visitor to a group based on the number of pages they have viewed or their location. There are lots of options - have a play!
Option 2: Using the JavaScript API
When you create an agent group, you are provided with a snippet of Javascript code that's unique to that group. You can get the code snippet by clicking Show embed code near the top left of the group editing view.
Paste this snippet below the existing Olark code on each page you want routed to that particular group.
/* custom configuration goes here (www.olark.com/documentation) */ olark.configure("system.group", "2fjsdvbn3345g"); /* Routes to sales */Troubleshooting
My chat box shows offline If a visitor is locked to an agent group, the chat box will only show as online if agents in that group are available.
Even if agents are available in another group, the chat box would still show as offline.
The visitor wasn't assigned to a group Using olark.configure('system.group','xxx'); will only work when your page loads, as the Olark chat box initiates.
If you want to assign the visitor to a group after the page has loaded, use api.chat.setOperatorGroup instead.
I want to re-assign a visitor to a group Visitors can only be assigned to a chat before an agent has responded. Once a visitor responds, they are locked to that agent group for that chat session unless manually transferred by the agent.
If an agent is in multiple groups, how are chats assigned? Olark does not look at the status of chats delivered by other groups when assigning new chats to agents. Should you be using the Round Robin chat routing configuration, Olark does not take into consideration any other chat delivered by other groups.